Practical experiences with Java software transactional memory

Abstract

In this paper, we evaluate the emerging Transactional Memory (TM) area by developing a set of Java transactional memory workloads and studying their performance under a Java Software Transactional Memory (STM) system and comparing them to their lock based counterparts. We provide a detailed performance and memory consumption analysis of the overheads of software transactional memory and transactional workloads within a production quality open source Java Runtime system. Additionally, we detail the impact of the various performance optimizations in both workloads and the underlying runtime system to improving both single thread performance and scalability.